Recent articles

How IndyStar’s Emily Hopkins helped break a nursing home scandal in Indianapolis

Emily Hopkins, a data reporter on the Indy Star Investigations team, spoke with Storybench about their reporting on improperly funded nursing homes in the time of COVID-19. Hopkins spoke about […]

November 23, 2020November 23, 2020 Mark Kobzik Behind the scenes, Interviews

How we used math to explore racial segregation in Pennsylvania public school districting

How the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism is reporting on water access around the world

How Cultural Survival is mapping the impact of the pandemic on Indigenous communities

Four tips from the Wall Street Journal’s Yan Wu on visualizing police data

How Nature magazine visualized 150 years of scientific discovery

How interactive, visual storytelling helps readers better retain information

2020 Election Coverage Tracker

Reopen schools narrative spreads across shadowy local news sites

Americans are divided about reopening schools this fall and polls show that this disagreement falls along party lines with Republicans more in favor of children returning to schools. Which is […]

August 26, 2020August 26, 2020 Aleszu Bajak Election Tracker

How news media are setting the 2020 election agenda: Chasing daily controversies, often burying policy

Facebook continues to run political ads with misinformation

Even before Ukraine news, Joe Biden was the 2020 candidate with the most media coverage

Pete Buttigieg is flooding Iowa and New Hampshire with Facebook ads about his climate plan

In the effort to cover impeachment inquiry, media ignores 2020 candidates

Gabbard, Booker and Biden get most negative media coverage over last four months

Tutorials

How to calculate a rolling average in R

Rolling or moving averages are a way to reduce noise and smooth time series data. During the Covid-19 pandemic, rolling averages have been used by researchers and journalists around the […]

June 22, 2020June 22, 2020 Martin Frigaard Data Journalism in R, How to

Update: How to geocode a CSV of addresses in R

How to shift Alaska and Hawaii below the lower 48 for your interactive choropleth map

What I learned applying data science to U.S. redistricting

How to use hierarchical cluster analysis on time series data

Diagnosing the accuracy of your linear regression in R

How to collect tweets from the Twitter Streaming API using Python

Behind the Scenes

How IndyStar’s Emily Hopkins helped break a nursing home scandal in Indianapolis

Emily Hopkins, a data reporter on the Indy Star Investigations team, spoke with Storybench about their reporting on improperly funded nursing homes in the time of COVID-19. Hopkins spoke about […]

November 23, 2020November 23, 2020 Mark Kobzik Behind the scenes, Interviews

How we used math to explore racial segregation in Pennsylvania public school districting

How the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism is reporting on water access around the world

How Cultural Survival is mapping the impact of the pandemic on Indigenous communities

Four tips from the Wall Street Journal’s Yan Wu on visualizing police data

How Nature magazine visualized 150 years of scientific discovery

How interactive, visual storytelling helps readers better retain information

Journalists don’t need to do what a bot does

October 26, 2020October 26, 2020 Sérgio Spagnuolo Insights

Pandemic news coverage is falling, but cases keep rising

Update: How to geocode a CSV of addresses in R

Audio storyteller Molly Segal on reporting in the wild

A roundup of coronavirus dashboards, datasets and resources

April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 Martin Frigaard Roundups

Five ways organizations are visualizing carbon emissions

Six ways you might consider visualizing political issues and ideologies this election

Six digital skills all new journalists should consider learning and a road map to unlocking them

Longform

Reporters often cover traumatic events but discussions of mental health are rare in most newsrooms. That’s changing.

Journalists who are frequently first responders at harrowing scenes of devastation and human suffering are primed to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, depression and anxiety – the “big four” […]

January 22, 2020April 3, 2020 George Barker and Stella Westlake Insights, Longform

Journalism schools need to focus on data, local news, social media and business models. Here are some that are.

The future of machine learning in journalism

Journalists improve coverage of memes with careful reporting

How the Palm Beach Post unearthed an opioid conspiracy with roots in Florida

Social media and news: The dilemma of our time

How The Washington Post designs its Snapchat stories

What is Storybench?

Storybench takes an “under the hood” look at the latest in digital storytelling, from data visualization and investigative journalism to virtual reality and the digital humanities. In addition to in-depth features and interviews with industry practitioners, we offer hands-on tutorials that can be “downloaded” right into the newsroom or classroom.

We also publish research we're running at Northeastern's School of Journalism along with collaborators in data science, communication studies, computational social sciences and information design. These projects include the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact, the Climate Journalism Lab, the 2020 Storybench Election Coverage Tracker and the Reinventing Local TV News project.

Want to contribute to Storybench? Pitch us or join us for a graduate degree in the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

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Storybench 2020 Election Coverage Tracker

The Storybench 2020 Election Coverage Tracker intends to keep tabs on the political coverage of the 2020 presidential election by covering media trends and using various data sources to explore media narratives.

Instead of keeping track of who’s ahead in the horse race, we’ll be turning our focus to those covering the horse race – the media outlets themselves and various proxies for public attention. Follow along here.

Best of Storybench

How the Wall Street Journal visualized 500+ conflicts of interest of the Trumps

Women on the 2020 campaign trail are being treated more negatively by the media

Getting started with data visualization in R using ggplot2

Understanding what makes a visualization memorable

Using French wine reviews to understand TF-IDF, a measure of how unique a word is to a document

Projects

Over the next two years we’ll be surveying the media’s coverage of the candidates and the issues. Follow along here.

The Reinventing Local TV News Project, from Northeastern’s School of Journalism, is analyzing the formats and practices of local news stations, and suggesting new ways of telling stories that can better engage diverse audiences. Read our inaugural post here.

The Climate Journalism Lab

The Climate Journalism Lab aims to examine and unpack the trends, tools and techniques employed by reporters and organizations covering climate change.

Join us at Northeastern!

Want to write for Storybench and probe the frontiers of media innovation? Apply for one of our graduate programs at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

Rolling admissions, no GREs required and financial aid available. Email here.

Interviews

Pizza, Press & Politics is our weekly speaker series at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. Watch interviews with David Filipov, Mike Workman, Jenn Smith, Martha Durkee-Neuman, Susan Labandibar, John Ward, Marc Fortier, Carol Gregory, Ling-Mei Wong and Elana Gordon.

Collaborative, Open, Mobile

Over the last three years, Storybench has interviewed 72 data journalists, web developers, interactive graphics editors, and project managers from around the world to provide an “under the hood” look at the ingredients and best practices that go into today’s most compelling digital storytelling projects.

They boil down to three key areas of emphasis: 1) highly networked, team-based collaboration; 2) an ethos of open-source sharing, both within and between newsrooms; 3) and mobile-driven story presentation. Read our paper here.